RAID 0 on OptiPlex 3010?

[Jaxseven]

I've just started a job as tech support for the high schools in my county and I've come across a bit of a challenge. In my school's media center we have 8 nearly decade old OptiPlexes all with 4GB of RAM and spinning HDD. They've been getting a lot of tickets for being slow since at idle the utilization is 100% for the HDD and 85%-90% of the RAM. My immediate thought is to upgrade the drives and memory, however we may not have funding to replace parts or computers.

 

We found some other computers in our school that work better and we may replace those so my second thought is to cannibalize some of the OptiPlexes we replace to upgrade the memory and configure the remaining slower computers into RAID0. Can anyone confirm whether or not they've been able to configure on a hardware level RAID0 on OptiPlex models 3010 and 3040?

[voyager_]

I can't say if the optiplex will support raid. General rule of thumb for raid0 is a no go. Personal rigs at home sure? why not if you can handle drive failure/loss of data without any problems. In a professional environment we stay far away a storage method that is so risky. Even with new drives I wouldn't chance it, and considering how limited your budget sounds i'm guessing you will be using whatever old drives you can get. In a perfect world staff should have everything saved to the server but that will never happen, there will be an event where a drive fails resulting in data loss and you won't hear the end of it. Drive usage being that high in my experience is a good sign the drive is rapidly approaching the end of its life. When you look at the drive utilization i'm willing to bet the speeds displayed are a fraction of what the drives should be capable. It's time to start trying to get the school district to spend some money. Best thing would be new pcs, minimum is to try and start swapping/cloning drives. They should only need smaller SSDs, maybe 250ish Gbs? 

 

Adding additional memory I would say go for it, but Raid0 is just asking for major problems.

[Pickles von Brine]

Hard  drive running at 100% when ram is in high ususage can be caused by page file usage. 
As far as RAID 0 goes, check in bios under sata configuration and make sure it says "RAID" then you reboot and you should be able to press control + I to gain access to the intel raid setup. 

If the sata mode operation is not available in bios then the system does not support RAID natively on the board and would require a raid card.